Indie developers have to worry about a lot of potential scams out there. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people that are looking to take advantage of gamers that might not be well-informed. In 2025, we’ve already seen indie developers having to contend with knock-off games created to confuse consumers, and now it seems that’s extended to strategy guides as well. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown licensing producer Mike Futter has taken to social media to warn players about a strategy guide claiming to be “official,” and was being sold on Amazon.
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Unofficial strategy guides have been a thing going back decades, but this isn’t like the ’90s where you could save a few bucks by purchasing an Ocarina of Time book from a company other than Nintendo. Those guides were still being written and created by dedicated authors. Instead, this Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles book is “clearly AI slop both inside and out,” according to Futter. The people selling the strategy guide are also pushing it as an official source, which is clearly not the case. In a post on Bluesky, Futter shared an image of the “guide,” and advised indie developers to search for their own games on Amazon to look for similar scams.
In a series of follow-up posts, Futter talked about the steps he immediately took to call attention to this scam. Thankfully, Futter was able to successfully get Amazon to remove the guide, and it’s no longer available for sale. Despite the book’s removal, gamers should be very careful about buying any similar guides from Amazon, even if they do claim to be “official.” Clearly, scammers have found a potential revenue source that they can create by using AI, and it’s unlikely that they’ll stop at Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown. We could see this happen with a lot of other high-profile games from indie studios.
The best way gamers can protect themselves from accidentally purchasing this type of book is by doing their research. Usually when an official guide has been released, you can find it mentioned on the game’s official website, or on the developer’s social media. Consumers can also look for any telltale signs that AI was used in the book’s creation. As Futter points out, even the cover for this book was AI generated: none of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has their accurate weapon. The sample pages for the guide also contain many factual errors, with Futter pointing out “hallucinated features” that don’t appear in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown.
Unfortunately, with AI use becoming more common, we’re probably going to see a lot more blatant attempts like this to separate people from their hard-earned money. Thankfully, if you’re the type of person that likes a nice strategy guide, there are still plenty of companies producing actual books based on games. They’re still a lot less common than they used to be, but we’ve seen them make something of a comeback over the last few years. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown doesn’t have a guide book of its own, but maybe that will change down the line.
Have you started playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown? Would you like to see an actual official strategy guide for the game? Share your thoughts with me directly on Bluesky atย @Marcdachamp, or on Instagram atย @Dachampgaming!
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